Calais
camp scuffles break out as refugees queue to leave
Riot
police kettle hundreds of migrants and refugees as they queue for
buses taking them to accommodation centres across France
Lisa O'Carroll in
Calais and Alice Ross
Tuesday 25 October
2016 09.12 BST
Scuffles have broken
out on the second day of an attempt by French authorities to clear
the Calais refugee camp, with at least one person removed on a
stretcher as French riot police kettled hundreds of migrants and
refugees as they queued for buses taking them to accommodation
centres across the country.
Police appeared to
struggle as hundreds of children penned into a small area outside a
processing centre became impatient and anxious to get to the front of
the queue.
Hundreds of people
were forced to sit on the road outside the warehouse, where they are
being processed. Volunteers arrived speaking Pashto to the mainly
Afghan boys and young men at the front of the queue.
Police armed with
handguns, Tasers and gas canisters then formed a line and pushed the
press back before then pushing the children back. Calm was eventually
restored after the small area allocated to the children was widened.
Almost 2,000
refugees and migrants from the camp passed through official
registration on Monday and were being transported by bus to regions
across France. An estimated 8,000 remain to be processed, the French
interior ministry said.
Nearly 200 under-18s
have arrived in the UK in recent days and hundreds more are expected
to arrive, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, told parliament on Monday.
However, a quarter of English councils have refused to take part in
resettling refugees.
The French
government is “determined to stop people coming back to Calais”,
the French ambassador to London, Sylvie Bermann, told Radio 4’s
Today programme.
“We won’t let
them come,” she said. “It has to be clear that Calais is a blind
alley and you can’t come to this country.” Refugees who do turn
up at the former site in the hope of reaching the UK will be
transported to other parts of the country and “convinced to claim
asylum in France”, she said.
Authorities hope
that demolition crews can move in later on Tuesday to start tearing
down the camp, one of the biggest in Europe, where thousands of
people have been living in dire conditions. The operation is set to
continue until Wednesday.
Christian Salome,
the head of the Auberge des Migrants (migrants’ hostel) charity,
told AFP the process was “working well because these are people who
were waiting impatiently to leave”.
“I’m much more
concerned about later in the week when the only ones remaining are
those who do not want to leave, who still want to reach England,”
he said, estimating their number at about 2,000.
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